Carole Raddato returns to PHOSPHOR-Ostia!

Our goal here at PHOSPHOR-Ostia is to create a picture site of all of Ostia.  We have started with nearly 800 of our own photographs.  And even though we’ve been to Ostia twice we still haven’t been able to cover the entire area.  To that end we extend an open invitation to all who have been to Ostia and who have high resolution pictures of it to allow us to show your work as part of the PHOSPHOR-Ostia project.

We’re very fortunate to have Carole Raddato as one of our contributors and we’ve started featuring her work as part of the on going effort to photograph Ostia.  So far we have some of her photographs from the Museo Ostiense and this week I’ve added her pictures of the Baths of the Forum, (I, xii, 6).  You can see her photos if you search for ‘carolemadge’ on PHOSPHOR-Ostia.  She tweets as @carolemadge and she has her own blog at http://followinghadrian.com

PHOSPHOR-Ostia isn’t Flickr for Ostia.  Every photograph has a lat/long pair attached, a set of relevant keywords, and its own map.  Each picture works to strengthen all the others – they are not scattered in a disorganized stream like so many picture sites.  Here, for example, is the PHOSPHOR-Ostia map of Carole’s picture contributions.  

New photographs of the Forum Baths by Carole Raddato.  PHOSPHOR-Ostia

You can easily generate a map on the site for any search word.  Try ‘mithra*’, or ‘Hadrian’ for example.  By the way, the ‘*’ character is a wild card for searching.

Anyone who has high-res pictures of Ostia Antica is strongly encouraged to get in touch with us because we’d very much like to show your pictures.  And welcome, again, to Carole Raddato!

Photo web site: PHOSPHOR-OSTIA

I have completed the first phase of the Phosphor-Ostia website by populating the site with nearly 800 pictures of Ostia-antica.  Ostia-Antica was the harbor city of ancient Rome.  All the pictures are fully key-worded and searchable.  Many such terms as ‘brick’, ‘Trajan’, and ‘mithra’ are supported along with 924 other distinct search terms.  You have the option to display your pictures against a map background, in a gallery (the default) or on a timeline.  We hope you'll explore the whole site.  And uniquely for this type of site you have the option to display you search term in a tagmap so, for example, if you display 'Trajan' on a tag map you'll get all the other Ostia-related terms associated with Emperor Trajan.

Photos of Ostia, Italy shown against a map background.

Nearly all of the pictures are photographs which we took ourselves in 2005 and 2010.  The site is intended to be a reference source of pictures of Ostia.  And so the pictures may be used by scholars, researchers, or students for free.  Even though no compensation or permission is required we do like to hear how our pictures are being used.  You can e-mail us at info@phosphor-ostia.org, or bob@squinchpix.com. We very much hope that the users, you, will be in touch.

This website is new and in the first stages of production.  We hope to continue to put photographs on the site and are always looking for photographs of Ostia to display.  Some areas of Ostia are not well represented in pictures, notable Regio V.

We want to take this opportunity to thank Drs Robert Harp and Dr. Jan Theo Bakker.  Such a site, with the name PHOSPHOR, was originally their idea.  And, if you don’t yet know it, you’ll want to check out Dr. Bakker’s  Ostia website on Ostia Antica.

More soon.